Re: Not using Makefile.am

[Nick Bowler]

On 2012-07-15 13:39 +0100, Eduardo Costa wrote:
> I'd like automake to try parsing my `configure.in' (and Makefile.in to
> the applicable extent) so it could guess which files should be copied,
> but obviously it will stop as soon as it notices no Makefile.am's are
> found, not giving me the chance to use it only for copying missing
> files.
[...]
> I'm not old or experienced enough to know, but I guess before
> Makefile.am's existed, people just used just to needed files manually,
> so I thought on copying `/usr/bin/automake' and remove the non-wanted,
> but then it needs to have the automake's directory hardcoded on it,
> and because automake's directory name uses to have it's version number
> appended, other user compiling my package in a future could not
> rebuild it as usual.

If all you need is to know where to find the various scripts that
automake normally copies into the source tree, then you can simply
run 

  automake --print-libdir

and it will print that location.  You can use this to have a bootstrap
script which copies the files you need.

Hope that helps,
-- 
Nick Bowler, Elliptic Technologies (http://www.elliptictech.com/)